HeartMath Tools

for Reducing Stress and

Staying Balanced
“Accessing our heart’s natural intelligence can create
an energetic field of unconditional love and
harmonious interactions – helping humanity to realize
we are one Earth, one yard, one people.”
– Doc Childre

Since 1991, when Doc Childre founded the nonprofit Heart-

Math Institute, our vision has been to provide tools that
connect us with “the heart of who we truly are.” HeartMath
serves people of all ages and walks of life around the world
in their homes, classrooms, and communities.

We research and develop reliable, scientifically-based

tools that bridge the connection between heart and mind
and deepen people’s connection with the hearts of others.
This empowers people to greatly reduce stress, increase
resilience and unlock their natural intuitive guidance for
making better choices. Together, the tools, technologies
and research enable us to realize our full potential as in-
dividuals and as a species to serve as caretakers for our
planet and generations to come.

Awakening the Heart of Humanity

HeartMath Institute (HMI) is committed to helping awaken
the heart of humanity. We believe that when we align our
hearts and minds and connect with others, we awaken the
higher mental, emotional, and spiritual capacities that fre-
quently lie dormant. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research and
education organization, HMI aspires to always conduct
our operations with passion, compassion, and a heartfelt
desire to transform lives.
 Table of Contents

Introduction .................................................................. 2

Anchoring..................................................................... 4

Attitude ......................................................................... 8

Coherent Communication .......................................... 10

Compassionate Lattitude ............................................12

Dignity.........................................................................14

Ease........................................................................... 16

Forgiveness  ............................................................... 18

Humility ...................................................................... 22

Love  ........................................................................... 24

Objectivity .................................................................. 28

Patience ..................................................................... 30

Stillness   ..................................................................... 34

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 Introduction
Welcome to the 12 HeartMath Tools for Reducing Stress and Staying
Balanced guide. The practices in this guide will help you engage and
deepen your heart qualities to move with more inner balance and poise
through stressful times.

We all have heart qualities within us, such as dignity, ease, love, patience
and compassion. It is our job to awaken these heart qualities more to bring
about the changes we wish to see in our personal life and in the world.
Accessing these heart qualities when we need them takes practice, and
this guide can help.

Remembering to qualify our interactions with love, kindness, patience,

compassion, takes practice due to the fast pace of life and so many things
vying for our attention. However, opening our heart more can make a
lot of difference in the outcomes. It’s the lack of heart connection that’s
behind much of the exploding stress levels that people are challenged
with. Getting along with each other through these changing times is of
“front-and-center” importance.

Though it can be challenging, we are being called to manage our own

energies. For example, there may be times when you feel anxious or
overwhelmed – then you may wish to use the “Ease” tool on page 16. Or,
you might find yourself being impatient or frustrated with family, friends or
life in general. This is a good time to review the “Patience” tool on p. 30.

This guide is user-friendly and can be practiced personally or with family

or friends as you choose. Individuals who genuinely practice these tools
find it easier to manage and reduce stress and overwhelm; experience
deeper connection and compassionate care with others; and to rise above
the depleting effects of drama.

Doing any of these practices a few days in a row with heart-filled intention
creates a cumulative effect that encourages the increased use of these
empowering heart qualities. We at HeartMath hope these practices help
you navigate life with more peace and balance.

Enjoy your heart journey!

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Journal/Notes

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 Anchoring
Sometimes we are deeply inspired by a new tool or information that
significantly could help us manage an energy-draining habit such as
impatience, frustration, anger, or something else important to us. However,
this initial inspiration can soon fade, unless we learn how to anchor it into
our memory recall for when we need it. The trick to anchoring inspiration
and intention is to consciously practice remembering it several times a
day for a week so that it begins to automatically pop-up when needed.

Inspiration has a magic about it, yet it leaves us something to do, which
is to step it down into action. But doing this soon is the key, along with
repeating it often. Know that the human tendency is to assume that we
will anchor our important intentions when we are riding the “high” from
the initial inspiration. In these uncertain times, with the global stress table
increasing, many people are finding it harder to effectively integrate helpful
intentions, even when they seem critical. I have compassion for this as I
have experienced it myself.

Recycling insights is part of the growth process. It’s your perspective and
attitude that create spiraling up or looping around in the old predictable
patterns. You can have conceptual memory, but if you have lost the feeling,
then the habit can pull you back down into old mechanical reactions.
Make markers of your insights and be earnest about acting on them. After
something is anchored, there’s a new reference, then whatever comes up,
you have new power to address it.

I’m aware that most readers know the importance of anchoring. Still, it can
be effective to review this practice, especially when trying to anchor tools
and exercises that help eliminate and prevent stress, while supporting
your health, well-being and clear thinking.

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Important steps to remember:

•  Step into inspiration and insights soon after experiencing them.

•  Revisit the insight throughout the day and breathe in the feeling
and memory associated with it. This will increase the strength of
your intention.

•  Practice each day for a week (or more) with deep intention. This is
what really helps to anchor it in. You can quicken your progress by
looking for opportunities to act on your insight and asking your heart
to prompt you to “take action” when those situations arise.

•  Appreciate any positive benefits from your practice of anchoring an

insight. Reinforcement lifts the spirit of your commitment.

“Inspiration is a spirit-filled moment.

It’s a packet of free energetic initiative — with a timer on it.
As we move forward with the first nudge of inspiration,
we can beat the human tendency to waste that intuitive gift
from our heart. Sometimes it’s many moons before
an important inspiration returns, if we miss it on the first pass.
Anchoring is practicing the economy of spirit.”
– Doc Childre

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 Journal/Notes

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 Attitude
Probably most people have had or still have some old attitudes and
perceptions they want to change for the better. These attitudes may include
being judgmental, impatience, edginess with others, and self-critical. The
following technique can help you to replace undesirable attitudes with more
positive and effective ones that prevent predictable stress accumulation.
Ask your heart’s intuition to alert you to all the old habit patterns that don’t
support your well-being.
Exercise: The Attitude Breathing™ Technique
Step 1.  Recognize the feeling or attitude you want to change and
identify a replacement attitude.
Suggestion: If your habit is being over-reactive and frustrated
with people, the replacement might be increased patience
and kindness.
Step 2.  Focus your attention in the area of the heart. Imagine your
breath is flowing in and out of your heart or chest area,
breathing a little slower and deeper than usual. Find an easy
rhythm that’s relaxing for you.
Step 3.  As you continue heart-focused breathing, practice increasing
the feeling of your new replacement attitude.
Suggestion: If you can’t find a replacement attitude, just
breathe a feeling of calm or neutral through your heart area for
a while. This often magnetizes feelings that lift our attitudes
and perceptions.
Step 4.  Practice maintaining your new feelings and perceptions as you
move through your day-to-day interactions.

Use Attitude Breathing as often as needed to integrate your new feelings

so they become your new attitude. Also, when you are feeling uplifting
feelings such as gratitude, kindness or compassion, use attitude breathing
to instate these feelings so they will return more often.

With a little practice, you will surprise yourself with your increased inspira-
tion and heart power to change many unwanted feelings, emotions and
mindsets that reduce your energy, resilience and your ability to feel good.

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 Coherent Communication
Life has taught many of us that the most sincere and effective form of com-
munication is connected communication in which the heart is engaged.
Often the increased speed of life causes our interactions to lack the heart
warmth of connected communication (coherent communication).

Coherent communication implies genuine listening and speaking with a

tone that reflects care and non-judgement. Practicing this is effective for
transforming much of the communication distortions we often experience
daily. In coherent communication our mind and emotions are aligned with
our heart’s care which sets the tone for true connection.

Exercise: The Coherent Communication™ Technique

Step 1.  Shift into a heart coherent state (a heart-felt, caring attitude)

before sharing and receiving information. (The Ease
Technique can help you shift into a heart coherent state.)
Suggestion: Set an intention to be respectful of others’
views or situations.

Step 2.  Listen for the essence of what is being said, without prejudging
or getting pulled into drama before the communication is
complete.
Speak from a genuine tone and consider what you are going to
say and how it may impact others.
Suggestion: Remember to re-center in your heart if you start to
overreact or lose emotional composure.

Step 3.  It’s effective to reflect (or mirror) the essence of what you heard
and be open to refinement to confirm mutual understanding.
Rushing communications often causes us to forget this step.

Practice the technique anytime you are communicating – to prepare before

phone calls, meetings and giving or receiving instructions. Shift back to
your heart if you become reactive, aren’t listening or are interrupting. We
all know how it feels to be on the downside of communications that are
not heart connected. Use this memory to inspire deeper connections in
your communications and interactions.

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 Compassionate Latitude
Compassionate latitude is an attitude of compassionate understanding
that most people are doing the best they can based on their stress over-
load, anxiety and the clouded thinking so many of us are experiencing.
Practicing compassionate latitude with each other can quickly begin to
reduce and prevent the stress build-up from our anger, judgments, and
resentments. It increases our tolerance, patience and deeper understand-
ing of another’s situation. This is so important for maintaining balance,
resilience and flow during these pressing times of change and unpredict-
ability. Latitude is the consideration and respect that all of us come up
short at times in our choices and make mistakes in our words or actions.
It’s time to skip the drama, forgive each other and move on quicker. Do it
because it’s intelligent and you’ll get quicker results.
As we practice care and kindness with each other, this opens our heart to
increased personal and collective intuitive guidance for the best choices
and direction through whatever life brings us.
Be especially kinder and more compassionate with yourself, because the
lack of this can quickly stack your stress deficit and compromise your
well-being. This takes a little practice, but this chapter in our lives calls for
these types of practice from the heart. (Finally!)
Exercise: Compassionate Latitude
1.  Start with quiet breathing while radiating feelings of gratitude.This helps
to shift our energy from the mind to our heart.
2.  Next, ponder for a while where you could give others more compas-
sionate latitude at home, at work, watching the news, sorting out mis-
communications, etc.
3.  Now visualize yourself replacing judgments, angered responses, lack
of tolerance and separation with compassionate latitude (care, kind-
ness, acceptance, cooperation and tolerance) for others and yourself.
Practicing several days in a row helps to anchor in this valuable habit.
4.  Now, radiate compassion and latitude to people with different biases
whose polarizing views are creating separation, stress and chaos. Un-
conditional love and compassion increase our well-being and resilience.
The need for love has been philosophized for eons – now is the time for
us to bring it to the street and see the intelligence behind it. New solutions
will be born from this.
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 Dignity
Our inner dignity is one of the primary motivators for self-empowered
actions. Dignity lifts us to realms of new possibilities where things begin
to transform, creating more stability in our lives. Undesirable patterns
begin to disappear and new patterns emerge as a new way of life.

“When you strive to become your true self

by following your heart, you nurture and increase
the available power of your inner dignity.”
—Doc Childre

Exercise: Achieving Inner Dignity Using Heart-Focused Breathing™

The Technique:
Focus your attention in the area of the heart. Imagine your
breath is flowing in and out of your heart or chest area,
breathing a little slower and deeper than usual. Find an easy
rhythm that’s comfortable.

The Practice:
As you breathe, imagine you are increasing your inner dignity,
inner strength and poise. This increases your power to
maintain your higher principles through life’s interactions.

When you practice breathing a sense of inner strength and inner poise,
do so for at least a couple of minutes, with feeling. Our dignity is the
foundational baseline of good character. It’s a source of extra strength,
especially at times when we are low on initiative.

Explore how increasing your inner dignity can encourage you to follow
through on choices that are best for you, even though they are not always
the most appealing. Dignity provides a strength that keeps us aligned with
our higher principles. It strengthens with use.

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Journal/Notes

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 Ease
The state of ease is a highly regenerative state that helps us flow more
easily through challenges and builds our resilience capacity. Inner ease is
not merely a state of relaxation. It is characterized by a balance between
the mind and emotions which allows us to access a sense of inner stillness
while on the move.
Operating from a state of ease is a natural practice for bringing the
essence of stillness into our day-to-day interactions. Start your day by
doing the Inner-Ease™ steps as this reduces mental and emotional static,
which clouds clear thinking and our reasoning capacity.

Exercise: Inner-Ease™ Technique

Step 1. Focus your attention in the area of the heart. Imagine your
breath is flowing in and out of your heart or chest area,
breathing a little slower and deeper than usual.
Suggestion: Inhale 5 seconds, exhale 5 seconds (or whatever
rhythm is comfortable).
Step 2. With each breath, draw in the feeling of inner ease to balance
your mental and emotional energy.
Step 3. Set a meaningful intent to anchor the feeling of inner ease as
you engage in your projects, challenges or daily interactions.

Breathing the feeling of ease supports cooperative agreement between our

heart, mind and emotions when we are making decisions, communicating
and planning. Our mind and emotions often fight each other for the shot-
call in decisions. This confusion blocks our sensitivity to our heart’s
intuitive choices for the highest outcomes.
Learning to move in the state of inner ease gives us more pause to
register our intuitive guidance in all of our interactions once you anchor
in this practice. Pause allows us to make conscious choices rather than
mechanical reactions. View inner ease as a state of “active calm” in
which our mental and emotional energy is composed, yet ready for swift
intelligent action if needed. Inner ease is not necessarily about moving
slow physically, unless some situations call for it – it’s about moving smart.
This is a powerful tool for preventing and neutralizing stress or sorting
out solutions and directions. Related Topic: Stillness.

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 Forgiveness
Forgiveness is a personal decision we have to make in the quietness
of our heart. When it’s time to take a step towards forgiveness, we will
find our intuition prompting us to start thinking about it, and then thinking
about it more often, which leads to stepping into it – if we don’t miss the
wave of opportunity that’s provided when our spirit is knocking on the
door to get our attention.

Many people feel separation and a lack of deeper connection with

friends or family, because in the past they were emotionally hurt by them.
Learning to release these feelings of disharmony is a powerfully effective
tool for personal peace and happiness. It’s understandable why we feel
it’s appropriate to hold onto bitterness and anger. It’s because this habit
has been handed down from generation after generation and passed off
as normal.

However, more people are realizing that holding onto and replaying these
hurt or resentful feelings block our heart’s care, which is important for
creating harmony and a healthy balance in our system and with others.
Acrimonious energy sustained and unchecked has been proven to release
hormones and neurochemicals that drain our system and can put our
wholeness health in harm’s way, especially if it’s imprinted with a lot of
emotion.

It’s common for us to feel that forgiving someone is about doing them
a favor. As we forgive and release that pent-up hurt or animosity and its
negative effects on our system, we are doing a major favor to ourselves
by increasing the well-being of our own personal system. In some cases,
forgiveness can be the difference in preventing major health setbacks,
or not. Through time these repressed feelings can syphon our energy
levels, our resilience and reasoning capacity, along with creating shades
of flatness in our joy and happiness.

Science and psychology have demonstrated the mental, emotional and

physical benefits from releasing these charged feelings – even a little bit
is better than nothing. Sure, some situations are harder to release than
others, yet some of the hard ones can be the most debilitating to our
system’s health and well-being.

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Today there is plenty of evidence of the debilitating effects of repressing
disharmonious energies. We are not bad people if forgiveness is hard,
but it’s a giant step in self-care if we go to our heart and gently start the
process even if it’s a little at the time, which is more effective in many
cases.

Our heart is the secret sauce for forgiveness. Good luck if you try
forgiveness from the mind alone. Yet it is often approached that way. Our
heart knows that we are gaining something by forgiving, while the mind
can resist forgiveness because it feels like it’s giving up something owed.
It’s the heart that adds the love, understanding and patience to stick
with the intention. Just know that forgiveness wouldn’t have increased
in popularity in the last 10 years if there wasn’t something significantly
beneficial that comes with it.

When your spirit, through your heart, is nudging you, this is a good time
to explore different approaches. Because your heart will draw the right
book, information or website with assistance that supports the way you
are natured. In some cases, people connect deeply enough with their
heart that they can get instant release, and forgiveness is complete.
This happens at times, but supportive methods are also helpful in many
situations.

Our spirit provides energetic encouragement and

wholeness healing, as we genuinely
put our heart into our intention to forgive
and free ourselves from the old.

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 Humility
Heart humility – that is, knowing who we truly are and accepting our strengths
with gratitude, our limitations without judgment and the world around
us with appreciation – is a powerful and attainable quality. Heart humility
can help us to walk through this world with confidence, integrity and self-
security along with abundance. Heart humility is being honest with our-
selves and others and expressing our gratitude and respect for all involved.

Heart humility does not require reserve or timid postures in our interactions
with others. Statements such as “I appreciate myself and all I have;
however, I really don’t deserve it,” are examples of false humility. True
humility doesn’t fade our personality into the background; it increases
our charisma and effectiveness. Here are some simple practices for
increasing humility.

Exercise: Humility Practices

1. Admit that you don’t have all the answers.

2. Be open to feedback from family, friends and colleagues.

3. Listen without judging or interrupting.

4. Engage with and accept different points of view.

5. Be willing to admit one’s own imperfections.

6. Lay aside ego and get in the trenches.

7. Make others feel valued, important and appreciated.

Some of the major benefits from practicing these aspects of humility

include earning the respect of friends, family and co-workers, along with
more creativity, harmony and peace at the end of the day. As we practice
putting more love and compassion into our interactions with each other,
our humility increases organically with ease, flow, and without having to
give it a lot of thought.

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Journal/Notes

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 Love
Love is an action word for achieving our next level of collective intelligence.
As collective conscious awareness increases, this will eventually reveal
that love is an advanced mode of intelligent living. Many are sensing that
collective compassionate love is emerging to become the next vibration of
love that humanity is transitioning into. This transition can be softened by
treating each other with kindness, respect and compassion. Without this
it can be a long and continuous stress-filled experience. This transition is
calling for heart-directed choices.

We are presently witnessing an experiential taste of two options:

1.  We are seeing an increase in care, compassion and a desire to
be helpful on the rise.

2.  At the same time, we are experiencing a forceful increase in

separation due to anger, hate, judgments spinning from strong
political biases and unresolved global cultural issues.

We are at a personal and collective choice point: Do we choose love,

kindness and peace, or separation, bitterness and more of the stress this
is already bringing? It is an individual choice and listening to our heart can
help with this. Consider that the way of love, kindness and compassion
hasn’t collectively been tried yet. However, the way of separation, fear
and blame has been around for a long time – Life seems to be calling for
us to “go figure”. It’s time to start getting along with each other!

Accessing our natural heart feelings and guidance can create an energetic
field of unconditional love which inspires our deeper connection and care
for each other. Most of us agree that the lack of this care increases the
separation, chaos and stress which much of humanity is experiencing.
As we’re kinder and more compassionate with each other, it can start a
process to reverse this momentum of fear and separation, but it starts
with our individual heartfelt commitment.

Following are some simple practice exercises that can be helpful for
increasing our love and collectively using the intelligence of love to
manifest coherence, harmony and peace.

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 Expanding Your Capacity to Love
Preparation Steps

Step 1: Focus your attention in the area of the heart. Imagine

your breath is flowing in and out of your heart or chest
area, breathing a little slower and deeper than usual.
This increases your capacity to focus on your intention.

Step 2: Activate and sustain a heartfelt feeling such as love,

appreciation, care or compassion for someone, an animal
friend, nature, etc. This helps to warm your heart feelings
and makes the following practice exercises more effective.

Practice Exercises:
These suggested exercises are bundled in no special order:

•  Sit a while in relaxed stillness and imagine breathing love into all your
cells. This helps to regenerate and refresh your system and spin off
accumulated stress. Remember that it’s already proven that love
energy can positively effect changes in our biology.

•  Increase the flow of heart energy through your system by practicing

qualities of love, such as appreciation, care, kindness, compassionate
care, patience, a desire to help, etc. This is one of the most effective
practices you can do to boost your resilience, emotional poise and
access to flow in these stepped-up times of change.

•  Practice radiating a soft love energy into your interactions with each
other or whatever situations that you find yourself in day-to-day.
Practice feeling love and compassion for people suffering hardships in
your environment and throughout the world.

•  Send love to calm your mind to reduce stress overload. Also, the
practice of forgiving ourselves and others especially steps up the
quality of our love and healing capacity.

•  Practice radiating love into future meetings or interactions you are

planning. This helps with deeper hearing and compassionate listening.

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 NOTE: It’s effective to do some of these exercises each day
so that radiating love becomes your norm. These exercises
are intended to inspire your own creative ways to increase
your love and find the transformational benefits that come
with it. Your heart will start to inform you of the myriad ways
love can be effective. Know that any situation you send
love to is raising the vibration of your own system and the
energetic field environment of the planet.

To Love Is Why We Are Here.

“People are just scratching the surface of awareness
regarding the focused power of love to create harmony and
order in seemingly impossible situations, especially in
healing issues with others or between countries and tribes.”
– Doc Childre

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 Objectivity
Objectivity involves finding the maturity to disengage from an issue for
a few moments, letting emotions ease off, so you can return to a more
objective view. This involves stepping back from the issue, so you can
keep an open heart and mind about what is really happening. Seldomly
are you able to resolve your issues if your mind is made up and your
emotions are locked in support.
The following technique was designed to create objectivity around an issue
and help clear emotional memories. The easiest way to get started with
the Cut-Thru steps is to practice on an issue as you read the steps. First,
pick a minor issue to start with, not one that’s highly charged emotionally
which are more resistant to change. Softer issues often resolve quickly,
yet they increase confidence and the resilience for taking on charged
mindsets and stuck places. Remember to keep your attention and energy
focused in the heart throughout the steps to stay coherent.

Exercise: Achieving Objectivity and Resolving Issues

Using the Cut-Thru® Technique
Step 1. Become aware of your feelings regarding the challenge or issue.
Step 2. Focus your attention in the area of the heart. Imagine
breathing ease or appreciation slowly and casually through your heart
or chest area.
Step 3. Assume objectivity about the feeling or issue, as if you were
considering it from a neutral observer’s perspective.
Step 4. Rest in neutral in your objective, mature heart. Soak and ease
any perplexing feelings in the compassion of the heart. This can help
dissolve the significance a little at a time.
Step 5. After dissolving as much significance as you can, sincerely ask
your heart’s intuition for appropriate inner guidance or insight. Ask your
heart what really matters here. This is an important part of Cut-Thru.
Learning to dissolve significance is important because the significance
we create adds more challenge than the issue itself – in many cases.
Suggestion: If you don’t get an insight, find something to appreciate for a
while and do Cut-Thru again at another time. Some issues take more heart
soak time to create release. It takes genuine compassion, patience and
appreciation to release old judgment histories that keep us disconnected
from each other. This will get easier in time. We are not bad for having these
feelings, yet we are happier and more effective as we transform them.
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 Patience
Patience supports our ability to manage our energies from a state of
ease, especially when things don’t move to suit our mind’s pace. The
speed of change can make life seem like it’s on fast-forward. This can
amplify impatience, irritation and frustration. These assumed small energy
leaks often turn into blockbuster energy deficits over time, if we don’t
reset and transform them into patience, resilience and flow.

Rushed, impatient energy diffuses our capacity for favorable outcomes.

When we push energy, this cancels the experience of flow and creates
hiccups in our intentions. It’s our mind that tends to rush energy; our
heart chooses balance, rhythm and flow. When cooperating together,
they increase outcomes that facilitate any situation.

Practicing patience and ease creates the energetic environment for flow
to take place in our communications, choice selections and actions.
Traffic jams, slow computers, and difficult people won’t disappear as
we practice patience. However, patience helps us attune our mental and
emotional nature to the most reasonable and effective ways for responding
to whatever life presents.

We often make high-spirited commitments for behavior changes and

then our intentions fade because the lack of patience drains the energy
from our commitment. Patience is a transformational heart quality that we
often forget when we need it the most.

To access or restore patience and resilience whenever needed, moving

with the attitude of inner ease is usually the missing ingredient. Breathing
the attitude of ease creates the tolerance that disarms impatience. Before
you respond to a vexing e-mail, person or situation, breathe ease and
settle the mind and emotions. This helps you pause and review your
response before you do or say something that creates an emotional mess
and the downtime it takes for damage control.

Our intuition constantly prompts us to be more patient, but most of us

know that initiative can slip away all too easily. Once we realize how many
mental and emotional setbacks and physical energy drains are caused

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from the lack of patience, you can bet we will commit like never before to
install patience as one of our most important assets for navigating these
times of high speed, unpredictable changes. Patience is a big deal. It’s
time for us all to accept this.

Exercise: Replacing Impatience with Patience

1.  Acknowledge your feelings as soon as you sense impatience,

irritation or frustration.

2.  Pause what you’re doing, focus on your heart, and breathe in the
attitude of ease. Imagine with each breath that you are drawing in
feelings of patience and calm.

3.  Once you activate your patience and regain your energetic poise,
breathe this feeling for a while longer to help anchor it in. After doing
this exercise for a day or two, your intuition will start to automatically
cue you up when impatience persists.

As we commit to replacing impatience with inner ease and patience,

our responses will play out with more balance, resilience, and clearer
discernment. This can prevent much of the energy drain and fatigue we
experience at the end of a day. Be patient with the process.

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 Stillness
It’s a highly effective energy saving choice to schedule times for practicing
inner stillness and allow our heart, mind and emotions to experience a
relaxed time-out from competing with each other over which decides the
choices and decisions we make. Stillness softens our determined mental
and emotional traffic so that our heart-speak can be heard.

Stillness requires a little practice because our mind will try to occupy
any available space, if the door is left cracked. However, if inner stillness
practices didn’t produce high-value results, think of all the centuries of
time that meditators and spiritually conscious people would have wasted
throughout history.

Forget the mystical and think of inner stillness as something practical and
street worthy. How many times have we told children or others to get
still inside and listen up because we have something important to tell
them? This is because we instinctively know that stillness plays a part
in the quality and depth of most people’s hearing ability. So, why not
use stillness in the way it can count the most—to quiet our mental and
emotional static so that we can hear the counsel and wisdom from our
heart’s intuitive guidance.

When our mind finally lets go in meditation, inner stillness is where we

land. From there we can reset and upgrade our life’s experience. As we
learn the value of inner stillness, this reduces life’s more challenging ways
of nudging us towards listening to our heart for guidance and discernment
for better choices.

We often hear ourselves and others say, “If I had more foresight, I would
have handled that situation differently.” Stillness is a primary source for
increasing our foresight and discernment. Inner stillness is a place that
our heart can speak without the mind running it off the road. In order to
“be still and know” we first have to be still enough to listen.

We suggest that practicing inner stillness to connect with our heart’s

intelligent guidance will become a most positive corner-turning step
forward for humanity.

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Exercise: Stillness

Step 1: As you breathe quietly, imagine your breath calmly slowing

down the vibration of your mental and emotional energy.
Stay with it and don’t care if your mind disrupts you. This
will improve with patience and practice.

To get benefits out of this stillness exercise, you don’t have

to totally stop the mind – even reducing thoughts and calming
yourself improves your capacity to sense your heart feelings
and suggestions. In a short amount of time, the power to
quieten your mind will increase.

Step 2: As you feel your energy calming, softly radiate love and peace
into your inner environment. This connects you with your heart
energy.

Step 3: While maintaining your state of calmness, ask your heart for
guidance, solutions, or deeper understanding regarding life
issues you are experiencing.

Step 4: Imagine stillness as a peaceful place in which you are sitting.

If thoughts do come up, don’t push against them. Casually
refocus on breathing love and peace into the stillness. Our
higher choices become more obvious as we increase our
capacity to listen in stillness to our heart’s intelligent guidance.

Note: When you’re listening for intuition, don’t expect a Siri or an Alexa
type attendant on the other end with a download of answers. Especially
on complex issues, intuitive feeling answers often come later – through
something someone says, something you read, while you’re in the shower,
driving down the road, etc.

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 Additional Free Resources
Explore HeartMath Institute’s collection of free resources,
offering practical solutions for expanding your heart connections,
personal growth, health and fulfillment.

This includes e-books, webinars, blog article, videos, Add Heart

Monthly Calls, a Personal Well-Being Survey and Science of the
Heart: Exploring the Role of the Heart in Human Performance e-book.
Also available are Free Mini-Courses, such as Trauma Education for
Humanitarian and Emergency Responders, HeartMath Education and
Resilience Training (H.E.A.R.T.) for Veterans and Service Members,
HMI Coherence course, and Heart Rate Variability (HRV) Basics.

Go to https://www.heartmath.org/resources/

Global Coherence Initiative is a science-based, co-creative project

to unite people in heart-focused love and intention, to facilitate the
shift in global consciousness from instability and discord to
compassionate care, cooperation, and increasing peace.
Become a Global Coherence Emissary and join others on the Global
Coherence App that connects people from all around the world.

Learn more at https://www.heartmath.org/gci/

Published in the United States of America by:

HeartMath Institute
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For all HeartMath trademarks go to www.heartmath.com/trademarks.
 14700 West Park Avenue
Boulder Creek, California 95006